


sweet about me

by ChancellorGriffin



Series: OT3: A.R.K. (Abby/Raven/Kane) [4]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Birthday Presents, Cooking, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Smut, Idiots in Love, Kitchen Sex, OT3, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-30
Updated: 2016-11-30
Packaged: 2018-09-03 05:28:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8698864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: Raven and Kane attempt to make a cake for Abby’s birthday, with predictably disastrous results.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [victorias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/victorias/gifts).



> Set pre-S3, during the time jump, but after the events of "Triangulation" and "Raven's New Toy," when the Abby/Raven/Kane OT3 has settled into domestic felicity. Based on a Tumblr prompt from @victorias and lowkey inspired by my headcanon from "The Life You Make In the Ruins" where Kane gets hooked on Julia Child.
> 
> P.S. this is the cake - http://www.apronstringsblog.com/julia-child-chocolate-almond-cake-recipe/

“You dismantled and rebuilt the entire oven and retrofitted it for solar electricity,” said Kane skeptically, without looking up from the inventory roster in his hand, pointedly ignoring the pleading face of Raven standing in the hallway outside his office.  “What do you mean, ‘baking a cake is _too hard_?’”

“Will you just come help me?”

“You said there was a recipe.”

“There is.”

“You can’t follow a recipe?  Raven, you’re a mechanic.  How difficult can this be?”

“It’s Abby’s birthday,” Raven reminded him, her voice wheedling and persuasive.  “I don’t want to fuck this up.  Pleeeeeeeease, Marcus, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?”

He leaned back against the back of the couch with a sigh, running a hand wearily through his hair and casting a dubious eye over the crates of weapons inventory piled in the corner.  “That can wait,” Raven insisted, reading his mind.  “Dad Miller won’t be back from Mount Weather with the next shipment until morning, you can do it then.”

“He has a name,” Kane chided her mildly.  

Raven dismissed it with a shrug. “We just call him Dad Miller.”

_“Raven.”_

“Can’t the inventory wait?”

He started to say no.  It could, technically, wait, but he was already behind and Abby was desperately overworked getting the Mount Weather equipment installed in Medical and weapons inventory was a task he and David could take off the Chancellor’s plate. But then he watched her check to make sure the hallway was empty, step inside, and close the door behind her, and realized it wasn’t going to be that easy.

“Trade you favors,” she offered with a teasing smile. He raised an eyebrow and leaned back, folding his arms to stare her down.

“Oh really,” he said, daring her a little.  “What’s your best offer?”

“Why don’t you scoot over and make a little room on that couch,” she said impishly, “and I’ll show you.”

* * *

Twenty minutes later, with their jeans zipped and clothes straightened once more (and Raven’s ponytail, incriminatingly mussed from the sofa cushions and Kane’s frantic hands, neatly smoothed back again and refastened) they made their way to the commissary.

The lunchtime rush was over, with a few stragglers left in the hangar, but the adjoining storage room Raven had helped Sinclair outfit with Mount Weather equipment and repurpose into a kitchen was deserted.  Gina had taken the recipe with her yesterday morning on her supply run and done the best she could in the bunker’s pantry, and she’d left detailed notes for Raven on the substitutions she’d been forced to make.

“’Two-thirds cups granulated sugar,’” Raven read aloud from the cookbook she’d left open on the long metal counter.  “’One tablespoon granulated sugar.’  Well, which is it, Julia Child?   _Jesus,_ this is complicated.”

“What in God’s name is a _tablespoon_?” muttered Kane, staring blankly at the array of glass jars in front of him containing half a dozen identical kinds of white powdery substances which a man raised on the Ark’s protein supplements could not possibly be expected to tell apart.

“Next to the bowls,” said Raven, gesturing, “on the metal ring.”

“Is it tisp or tibbisp?” he asked in confusion, squinting to read the tiny etched markings on the spoon handles.

“Tibbisp,” she said. “The other is teaspoon.”

“Their measuring system was based on _types of spoon_?  Good God, how many different spoons are there?”

“I think it’s just two,” she said.  “Don’t get sidetracked, I need you to pulverize the almonds.”

“What?”

“It says two-thirds cups pulverized almonds.”

“Why a _cup_?  How is that an efficient measurement system?  Cups are all different sizes!”

“They’re next to the ring with the spoons.”

“There are _special cups_?”

“I said to you – “

“I know, I know.”

“I said to you, I said, ‘I’m trying to bake a cake for Abby’s birthday and I can’t do it by myself because it’s too hard,’ and then _you_ said – “

“I take it back.  This is worse than the Ark’s engineering system.  Where do I find pulverized almonds?”

She pointed to a glass canister full of what looked like seed pods, light brown and pockmarked with a pointed oblong shape.

“What are those?”

“Gina says they’re almonds.”

“They didn’t have pulverized ones?”

“I think we have to do it ourselves.”

“She didn’t bring back some kind of device labeled ‘almond pulverizer’ from the kitchens, I suppose,” he suggested, but Raven wasn’t listening.

“Why is she telling me about different amounts of sugar twice?” she lamented.  “Is one of them a mistake?  Maybe the second one’s a mistake.”

“Okay, but the almonds – “

“Figure it out, Kane,” she said, “I’m still deciphering the sugar.  Just bring me enough pulverized almonds to fit into that metal cup marked ‘2/3’ and then I’ll give you your next job.”

The first step was complicated – boil a pan of water until “almost simmering” (“How the hell do you know if it’s _almost_? Am I supposed to read its goddamn mind?” Raven snapped at the weather-beaten copy of _Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. I_ lying open in front of her), then remove it from the heat, then place into it a smaller pot containing four squares of the bitter, mahogany-brown, aromatic baking chocolate Gina had been carefully hoarding for her, along with two tibbisps of black coffee.  The recipe recommended rum, which they didn’t have, but suggested coffee as a substitute; they seemed like extremely different things to Raven, but this was the only cookbook in Mount Weather they had actually kept in the kitchen and not in the library, which seemed to indicate that this Julia Child person knew what she was talking about.  

There were a couple of near-disasters, and more than a little wasted water; afraid to risk ruining the chocolate by submerging it in water that had been over-boiled, in case for some reason that was a mistake, when she realized the first three times she’d missed the “almost simmering” window, she dumped the pot out.  But the fourth time she was successful, catching it just as the surface of the water began to think about bubbling, and she pulled it off the burner to set the tiny pot of chocolate and coffee inside to melt just as Kane returned triumphantly with a sterilized plastic medical waste bag containing what looked like sandy brown dust.

“I pulverized the almonds!” he announced proudly.  “They don’t taste very good, it’s a bit like eating tree bark, but maybe they taste different after they’re cooked?”

“Awesome,” she tossed back over her shoulder at him.  “I bet that was the last hard part!  The rest just looks like stirring things into other things.  We can do this.”

“We can totally do this,” he agreed.

* * *

Three hours later, running dangerously low on both egg whites and patience after discarding Cake Attempt #4, both they, and the kitchen, were a wreck.

The first thing that had gone wrong was that Julia Child explained nowhere in her book what “creaming” butter and sugar together meant, so Raven had simply melted the butter and dumped the sugar in, giving the batter a decidedly weird consistency.  This was followed by some confusion about eggs – whether the larger eggs from the wildfowl the Grounders shared with them would work the same as a 20th century chicken’s egg, which was followed by a debate over what a “white” and a “yolk” were and how on earth to separate them, which was followed by Raven throwing up her hands in the air and deciding that since it was all going into the same batter they should just put in the whole egg, which made the next step (“beat egg whites and salt into separate bowl until stiff peaks form”) functionally impossible, which was followed by Raven giggling over making Marcus say “stiff peaks.”  

Gina had left notes on the shelf of kitchen equipment explaining what a “whisk” was, but she’d neglected to mention how wearying it was to use one by hand.  But by the fourth try, they’d finally gotten past the egg stage and moved on to the flour and almonds, which felt like heroic progress.

“’Blend the melted chocolate into the butter and sugar mixture,’” Kane read aloud as Raven scurried from counter to refrigerator gathering the next round of ingredients.  “’Then stir in almonds and almond extract. Immediately stir in one-fourth of the beaten egg whites to lighten the batter. Delicately fold in a third of the remaining whites and when partially blended, sift in one third of the flour and continue folding. Alternate rapidly with more egg whites and more flour until all egg whites and flour are incorporated.’ I quit,” he said irritably, slamming the book closed.  “This is too complicated.  I still don’t know what half of these words mean.”

“But we’re so close!” she protested.  “Look.  We’re at step five!  We’ve never gotten to step five before!  It’s time for your almonds now!”

Kane – who was, in fact, rather proud of his ingenuity with the almonds – relented, as she’d known he would, and poured the gritty beige powder from his bag into the metal cup marked “2/3” before holding it out to Raven.

She examined it closely.

“This doesn’t look right.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s supposed to look like soft sand.  This looks like gravel.”

“I did the best I could.”

“What did you do?”

“I put the almonds in the bag and then ran back and forth over it with the tires of the Rover,” he said, pleased with his own ingenuity, but Raven looked skeptical.

“What did you do with the shells?”

“The what?”

“The shells.  The almond shells.”

“What shells?”

She stared at him.  “Did you … did you just crush the whole almond?”

“I pulverized it.  Like you said.”

“Kane, you dumbass, the almond is the part _inside_ ,” she snapped, exasperated.  “Look.”  And she grabbed a heavy steel mallet from the tool caddy, smacked it down on the almond, and opened it to show him the snowy white interior of the nut inside its ridged brown coat.  “ _That’s_ an almond, moron,” she said.  “The outside part is the husk.  You don’t eat it.”

“How was I supposed to know that?”

“Didn’t you take Earth Skills?  Didn’t they teach you about nuts and seed pods?”

“For _wilderness survival_ , not for birthday cakes.”

“All right, pull up a stool,” she sighed, and dug around in one of the kitchen drawers until she found a pair of metal contraptions, handing one to Kane.  “We’re cracking almonds.”

“How many until we fill up the 2/3 cup?”

“No idea.  Hundreds, probably.”

He buried his head on the counter.  “Does it _have_ to be a cake?” he asked, voice muffled.  “Can’t we just steal a bottle of whiskey and do bedroom things with her instead?”

“Well, bedroom things _too_ ,” said Raven dryly, raising an eyebrow, “but birthday cakes are an Earth tradition.  And she’s never had one before.”

Kane sighed with what he felt to be truly heroic patience and took the nutcracker from her hand.

It was tedious, wrist-numbing work, and Raven insisted on pulverizing the almonds with a mallet instead of trusting Kane to do it with the car tires again, but finally, finally, they had the metal 2/3 cup packed to the brim with a fine, sandy almond powder, ready to add to the cake. Kane held the bowl of butter and sugar as Raven painstakingly poured the melted chocolate mixture in, then unstoppered the little glass bottle of almond extract to add a few drops before sprinkling in the almonds, and something magical happened.  The chocolate and coffee scent wrapped around them and they breathed it in, marveling with huge stupid smiles on their faces at how it suddenly smelled and looked like something that might become a real cake. 

“You get the oven and the pan ready,” Raven commanded. “We’re so close.”  And as he adjusted the oven, carefully spread butter and flour on the surface of the cake pan, and got the cooling rack ready, she poured egg whites and flour into the chocolate batter, stirring it until the white streaks melted into the dark brown, and finally it was ready.  

“We did it,” Kane whispered with something like awe as Raven poured the mixture into the cake pan and placed it into the oven.  “We made a cake.”

“Don’t jinx it!” she reproached him.  “It’s not done yet.  It could still be a disaster.”

“Well, it doesn’t have seed pods in it, so we have that going for us.”

She laughed.  “Here,” said said, holding out the rubber spatula now covered in chocolate batter. “Let’s taste it.”

It was only butter, sugar, chocolate, almonds, eggs – humble, ordinary things – but for their tastebuds which had been bred into dullness by 97 years of gray rectangles labeled “Nutritional Supplement,” it might as well have been a royal feast.  The almond extract made the sugar taste, somehow, sweeter, but the bitterness of chocolate and black coffee cut through it with a bright spike of pleasing sharpness.  There were only half a dozen ingredients in the bowl, but Kane thought he could taste a hundred different things in it at once.  His tongue ran slowly, decadently up the surface of the spatula, cake batter melting onto his tongue, and he heard Raven’s hissing intake of breath as she leaned in close and put her own mouth to work too.

The kitchen was lit with glaring fluorescent lights, there was flour in Raven’s hair and almond dust on the knees of Kane’s jeans, and someone could wander in from the hangar at any moment and catch them in the act, which meant that none of this ought to be erotic at all.  But when the spatula had been licked clean and Raven’s warm, chocolate-scented mouth captured his in a sticky kiss, he was just as ready as she was.  His hands fell to her hips as he backed her up against a long empty stretch of metal counter, well away from the breakable glass jars on their work surface, his tongue caressing hers, licking the last drops of chocolate from her mouth, drinking her up, savoring her.

“How long do we have?”

“Twenty-five minutes.”

“Perfect,” he murmured, turning the lock on the kitchen door before lifting her up as though she weighed nothing to seat her comfortably on the edge of the metal counter, leaning back against the wall.  As he unfastened Raven’s leg brace to set it aside, tugging off her jeans and cotton shorts, she reached out to grab the batter bowl, pulling it close to trace her fingers along the sides and scoop up the remains of the batter, licking her fingers clean.

“You better be planning to share that,” he reproached her, pulling her hand away before it could reach her lips and devouring it with his own instead.  She closed her eyes, humming a little sigh, shivering at the rush of his lips and tongue sucking all the chocolate off her fingertips as he fumbled with his zipper and pulled down his jeans and shorts.  With her other hand, she gripped him by the belt loops and yanked him in close, scooting forward and wrapping her good leg tightly around his waist.

“More?” she asked, and he grinned, so she scooped up more chocolate from the near-empty bowl.  But this time, as he leaned in to nip at her fingers, she pulled them away, lifting up her shirt to bare her stomach and sliding her sticky fingers along the caramel skin.  He didn’t wait for an invitation to dive in, burying his mouth in her flesh, hungrily lapping at the taut stomach muscles until every last drop of cake batter was gone. “More?” she asked again, this time tugging her shirt all the way off, and he knew the next scoop of chocolate batter would land on the golden swell of her perfect breasts before it had even happened.  Her hands fell to his waist, holding him tight as he gripped her ass firmly in strong hands, then angled himself to her entrance and slowly nudged his way inside. 

She gasped, as she always did, at the first sensation of his massive cock stretching her open, and her fingers dug into the flesh of his hips as her back arched forward, opening up her throat to his hungry mouth.  He lapped up the sweet sticky mess on her breasts until every last drop had been savored, moaning softly into her warm skin as she took him further and further inside.  She was still wet from before, when she rode him on the Chancellor’s couch, and he knew she’d had Abby a few hours before when she came by Medical to bring her lunch. To say nothing of what was likely to happen when they arrived at Abby’s door with a bottle of moonshine and a cake intended to be consumed in their bed.  

On the Ark, Marcus Kane would never have thought of himself as the kind of man to have sex three or four times in one day with two different women, but Raven coming into their lives had changed everything, both for him and for Abby.  It sent waves of heat through his whole body to imagine Abby’s slow, amused smile as they regaled her with the story of their kitchen exploits – not just the near-disaster with the almonds, but this part too, as Raven braced her back against a cabinet full of roasting pans to hook her knee around Kane’s hips and pull him into her harder and harder.

“More chocolate?” Raven asked as his lips found her throat, shivering at the rough scratch of beard against her soft skin, but he shook his head.

“No,” he murmured, “just you.”

He could feel her begin to rise toward orgasm a few minutes later, but there were still fifteen minutes left on the clock, and he intended to use every minute of their time.  So he slowed his pace down, languid and deliberate, savoring her soft fluttering cries, eyes wide with startled pleasure, as he glided deep and smooth inside her.

They finished in this order – Marcus, then cake, then, finally, Raven, who came with a vast silent shudder (she wasn’t as noisy in bed as Abby, but in public places, they’d both had to learn how to keep themselves quiet), gasping into the hollow of his shoulder and clutching wildly at his hair.

“Oh God,” she panted, leaning back against the cabinets to catch her breath as he switched off the oven and pulled the cake out to cool. “Happy Abby’s birthday to me.”

“Look!” he exclaimed.  “It looks like a cake!”

“You’re bare-assed in a public kitchen,” Raven observed.  “Gina will kill us.”

“Worth it,” he pronounced.  “This smells incredible.”

They let it cool on the metal rack as Kane got dressed again, then helped Raven back into her clothes and snapped the leg brace back on, lifting her down from the counter and holding her carefully until she felt steady on her feet.  (She was always a little giddy and loose-limbed after sex, and she’d broken her bedside lamp once trying to walk again too soon after a particularly rowdy night with Abby.)

“Look at that,” Raven murmured in a tone of delighted awe, making her way over to the counter to inhale the warm almond-chocolate aroma. “Look what we did.  We made a cake.”

“We made like five cakes,” he reminded her.  “We just threw the first four away.”

“But we made one good one,” she retorted.  “A _real_ one.  A _French_ one, even.  A real Earth birthday cake.”

“This was important to you,” he said suddenly, tilting his head to regard her with curiosity, and she blushed and looked away. “Why?”

“I’m not good at saying it,” she mumbled indistinctly, after a long pause.  “Not with words.  Not like you are, or like she is.  I’m not good at _saying_ it.”

“Raven – “

“I’m good at _doing_ things, I’m good at _making_ things – I wanted to _make_ something, instead of – “  She stopped, cutting herself off.  “I’m just not good at saying it,” she said again, hesitantly, and he didn’t press her for any more than that, just brushed a flour-streaked tendril of hair out of her eyes and kissed her mouth.

“She’s going to love it,” he told her, “because she loves you.”

“She’s going to love it because I didn’t let you fill it with ground-up seed pods that you crushed by driving the Rover over a plastic bag,” Raven pointed out, which was impossible for him to deny.

“You’re absolutely right,” he agreed, grinning over his shoulder as he unbolted the kitchen door and pushed it open.  “Now come on.  “We’ve got a birthday cake to deliver.”


End file.
